Bøger af Jeffrey M. Bale

During the past 2 decades, two interrelated security threats have emerged that Western democracies will likely be forced to contend with for the foreseeable future. The first of these threats is multifaceted inasmuch as it stems from a complex combination of religious, political, historical, cultural, social, and economic motivational factors: the growing predilection for carrying out mass casualty terrorist attacks inside the territories of "infidel" Western countries by clandestine operational cells that are inspired ideologically by, and sometimes linked organizationally to, various jihadist networks with a global agenda. The most important of these latter networks is still the late Osama bin Laden's high-profile group Qa'idat al-Jihad (The Base [or Foundation] of the Jihad), together with its many organizational offshoots and regional affiliates.

The authors argue that the potential threat of a resurgence of fascism has been consistently exaggerated from 1945 until present day; that the ongoing lack of conceptual and definitional clarity with respect to terms like fascism, the radical right, the alt right, white supremacism, populism, racism, etc., has enabled ill-informed or dishonest commentators to distort their meaning and abusively misapply those labels so as to delegitimize their political opponents; and that the political and economic elites in charge of contemporary Western societies are now deliberately exaggerating and exploiting the threat posed by the domestic radical right in order to facilitate vilifying, harassing, de-platforming, censoring, canceling, and repressing disgruntled citizens (no matter where they may lie along the political spectrum) who openly criticize and vigorously oppose their agendas. The authors also advocate the use of well-established scholarly methods for carrying out research on the right and provide precise definitions of various terms in order to facilitate the development of more accurate categorizations.